Unveiling diverse planet formation environments with millimeter imaging

Planets are made from dust, gas, and ice in disks around young stars. Disk observations offer insight into why planet properties vary, and ultimately how places like the Solar System might develop. Planet formation models have been heavily shaped by the nearby, isolated disks that could be most readily observed. To explore variations in planet formation conditions, the program will use radio telescopes to analyze the structure and chemistry of disks in environments that have been characterized in less detail. The investigator will train a graduate and an undergraduate student. She will also mentor underrepresented public high school students as part of Columbia University's Engineering the Next Generation program. This program will conduct sensitive observational studies of protoplanetary disks under conditions that have traditionally been challenging to characterize in order to provide a better understanding of how the circumstances of planet formation might deviate from those of the best-studied systems. Molecular line and dust continuum images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-millimeter Array will be used to compare the chemical properties of disks undergoing late infall of cloud/envelope material to previous observations of isolated disks, re-evaluate the evolutionary classification of an apparently young, embedded disk exhibiting evidence of planet-disk interactions, and search for disk substructures in a highly irradiated star-forming region to assess whether planet-disk interactions occur in a manner similar to nearby, less-irradiated regions. The investigator will also use widefield CO mapping with the Green Bank Telescope to characterize the mass and distribution of the large-scale gas reservoir available to a disk undergoing late infall. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.